Cotton Town, Please Respond

The Twenty Dollar Miracle

1967

The American woman is the best dressed woman in the world. This is due to Yankee ingeniuty, which makes a fashionable, well-made dress to sell for twenty dollars or less.

Radostná práce

1946

Metamorfosi

2025

Machines relentlessly working under the scorching sun. Pumps, reels, and unbearable horizons behind corrugated metal sheets that spark at the touch. Eleven months after the devestated floods of 2023, the rural greek settlement of Metamorfosi, awaits the end of a suffocating August and its inevitable transformation.

The Golden Thread

2022

In the heyday of the jute industry, millions of people in Bengal made their living doing this laborious work, which has hardly changed since the industrial revolution. The 100-year-old machinery has been endlessly repaired. State aid kept this sustainable alternative to plastic going, but its future looks bleak.

Súkeníctvo kedysi a dnes

1951

Cotton Road

2014

What does a rural town in South Carolina have to do with China? Americans consume nearly twenty billion new items of clothing each year, and at least one billion of them are made in China. Cotton Road uncovers the transnational movement of cotton and tells the stories of workers lives in a conventional cotton supply chain. From rural farms in South Carolina to factory cities in China, we span the globe to encounter the industrial processes behind our rapacious consumption of cheap clothing and textile products. Are we connected to one another through the things we consume? Cotton Road explores a contemporary landscape of globalized labor through human stories and provides an opportunity to reflect on the ways our consumption impacts others and drives a global economy.

Waiting for the Carnival

2019

A documentary film about the Brazilian town of Toritama, the self-proclaimed capital of jeans. The workers of the city’s self-managed small businesses only get one real break from their self-exploiting lives in the textile business: the annual Carnival.

Enterprise: A Documentary Film

1948

Film sponsored by the Troy, New York–based manufacturer of Arrow shirts to explain its reasons for moving its business down south. The true story of how two World War II veterans invited the company to occupy an industrial plant that they had built in the hope of revitalizing Buchanan, Georgia. Five hundred residents signed a pledge stating that they were willing to work in the new factory. Cluett, Peabody & Co. eventually employed one-third of the townspeople.

Moravský Manchester

2023

What has shaped the appearance of Brno and the lives of its inhabitants over the last two centuries? What do architectural monuments and cultural and social traditions refer to?

At the Lőrinc Spinnery

1972

A candid portrait of the women working at the Lőrinc spinning mill. As with so many of Mészáros’ shorts, this work has foundations in autobiography, and she would later return to this particular world in one of her fiction features.

The Old South

1940

This short film chronicles the importance of cotton to the economy and culture of America's Old South.

Riveted: The History of Jeans

2022

Riveted: The History of Jeans reveals the fascinating and surprising story of this iconic American garment. At any given moment, half the people on the planet are wearing them. They have become a staple of clothing the world over, worn by everyone from presidents and supermodels to farmers and artists. More than just an item of apparel, America’s tangled past is woven into the indigo blue fabric. From its roots in slavery to its connection to the Wild West, youth culture, the civil rights movement, rock and roll, hippies, high fashion and hip-hop, jeans are the canvas on which the history of American ideology and politics is writ large.

...und der Vater blieb im Krieg. Begegnung mit syrischen Waisen

1990

Director Junge was commissioned by the GDR in the country for the first time in the summer of 1970; his film In Syria auf Montage accompanies German engineers who train workers in the Homs textile factory. Shortly after filming ended, Hafez al-Assad put himself under the dictator. Twenty years later emerged ... the father stayed in the war over a youth club with Syrian orphans in Bad Saarow, whose fathers had died in the Lebanon war and accompanied them to Syria, where they were housed in separate, elite "schools of martyr children". Multi-faceted documents that oscillate between peaceful and tense, hopeful and unsettled.

R.F.D. Greenwich Village

1969

A look at Greenwich Village, produced by the Cotton Producers Institute.

El algodón y la sangre

2025